In data management systems, information data of products and technical assets are stored in data sets. This holds in particular for enterprise resource planning software, like SAP R/3 or data models within master data management. Products may be comprised of data consisting of documents, document links, category assignments, collections of attributes, such as an SAP product master like extensions and sets, references and/or other links, like product relations, text elements, e.g. short texts and long texts. Within product data sets, data block may be defined. These data blocks comprise sets of product data within logically and/or systematically arranged blocks. Data block may as well be understood as data segments.
Often, data sets of different data bases have to be merged into a data base of existing data management systems. This might be the case, when two different systems are to be merged. Also, data bases of different companies might need to be merged into one data management system. It might also be necessary, to merge data of former data management systems into a data management system of a later release. This data management system of the later release may already comprise some data. The new data has to be merged with data from the former data management system without losing relevant information.
In present merging methods, there is a drawback that during importing and merging the new data, duplicates within the new data base may be created. In current systems, it is not possible to determine how two or more data sets of the same kind, e.g. of one product, may be merged into one single data set. The merging process thus faces different constraints.